Stephan Loewentheil’s interview with Bruce McKinney of Americana Exchange, discussing Stephan’s thirty years in the rare book and photograph business, was published today. The full story is available here.

Cornell University Library celebrates its 8 millionth volume on Friday February 21: a spectacular Civil War photograph album assembled for Louis-Philippe d’Orleans, Comte de Paris. This is one of the finest surviving Civil War photograph albums, with 265 rare photographs by the preeminent photographer Mathew Brady and others. The album contains unusual images of infantry, artillery, and cavalry units preparing for battle, military field operations, gun emplacements, and camp scenes as well as rare portraits of Union and Confederate officers, prisoners of war, and Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. The album is a gift from Beth and Stephan Loewentheil, and it will become a part of the historic Beth and Stephan JD ’75 Loewentheil Family Photography Collection.

The Royal Library of Sweden honored Stephan Loewentheil for the recovery and return of two books stolen more than a decade ago by the former head of the library’s manuscript’s department. At the ceremony, a representative of the library stated, “Stephan Loewentheil’s decision to return these two cultural treasures to the Royal Library of Sweden should serve as an example for ethical book dealers and collectors in the United States and around the world.  As Mr. Loewentheil demonstrated, these stolen books should be returned to the people of Sweden and the Royal Library, their true owner, and made available to the public.  They should not be secreted away in private collections.”

Selection from the Loewentheil Family Photographic Collection were exhibited at Cornell University’s Carl A. Kroch Library in 2011-2013. Dawn’s Early Light: The First 50 Years of American Photography documents the momentous first half-century of photography in America, which embraced and transformed the new technology to create, as Walt Whitman once observed, “the best history—a history from which there could be no appeal.”

We are pleased to have loaned a major 8th-century Exodus manuscript to the Shrine of the Book (home of the Dead Sea Scrolls) at the Israel Museum for the exhibition Piecing Together the Past. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, announced the exhibition of two extremely rare fragments of the same ancient Hebrew manuscript, separated for centuries and reunited for the first time. Following the 2007 presentation of the previously unknown Ashkar-Gilson Manuscript in the Shrine of the Book, scholars discovered that the mysterious fragment came from the same ancient scroll as the well-known London Manuscript. Dating from the 7th or 8th century, this scroll of the book of Exodus comes from the “silent era” – the six-hundred year period from the 3rd through 8th centuries CE from which almost no Hebrew manuscripts have survived. Miraculously, two such fragments, originating in the same Torah scroll, found their way many years later into different collections.

Alongside the reunited fragments, which include the Song of the Sea, a biblical poem celebrating the Israelites’ safe crossing of the Red Sea, two other manuscripts containing the Song of the Sea are displayed: a section of the book of Exodus, found near the Dead Sea, and dated to the late first century BCE; and a section of Exodus from a medieval Torah scroll (10th or 11th century). The Shrine of the Book exhibition, Piecing Together the Past: Ancient Fragments of the Song of the Sea, is on display through May 2010.